Category: linguistics

What the heck is an action verb?

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Here’s an interesting post on transitive verbs by the website Grammar Bytes. The author, Prof. Robin L Simmons, says that:

A transitive verb has two characteristics. First, it is an action verb, expressing a doable activity like kick, want, paint, write, eat, clean, etc. Second, it must have a direct object, something or someone who receives the action of the verb.

That first characteristic is news to me, especially since five of those six verbs can also be intransitive (kick, paint, write, eat and clean). But let’s back up a second. A transitive verb is indeed a verb that requires an object. So want is a transitive verb because we can’t just say I want. We have to say I want (something).

But why does a transitive verb also have to be an “action verb”? Lose is a transitive verb in the sentence I lost my keys, but can we say that I’m doing something by losing my keys? Or that losing my keys is some “doable activity”? Another example is have in the sentence He has an inheritance. Not really something he’s done, no action undertaken by him, he just has that inheritance. Or how about I don’t have many clothes? The verb have doesn’t sound very action-packed in that sentence, but it’s still transitive. I’m starting to think that maybe “action verb” is not a very useful grammar term. Some more action-free transitive verbs (underlined):

Lord, it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar. Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars, it’s been the same way for years. We need a change.

This type of shit happens all the time. You got to get yours but, fool, I got to get mine.

I float like gravity, never had a cavity, got more rhymes than the Wayans’ got family.

If everybody had an ocean across the USA, then everybody’d be surfing like California.

Every kind of language has rules

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Yes, even the ones that you don’t like. Here’s a quote from Spoken Soul by John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford (2000: 92). It’s perfect in expressing the point that all language varieties have rules:

Every human language studied to date – whether loved or hated, prestigious or not – has regularities or rules of this type [i.e. conventional and systematic ways of pronouncing, modifying, and combining words]. A moment’s reflection would show why this is so. Without regularities, a language variety could not be successfully acquired or used in everyday life, and this applies to Spoken Soul, or Ebonics, as much as to the “Received Pronunciation,” or “BBC English,” of the British upper crust. Characterizations of the former as careless or lazy, and of the latter as careful or refined, are subjective social and political evaluations that reflect prejudices and preconceptions about the people who usually speak each variety.

That is so good. The book that it appears in is about Black English (also called African American Vernacular English), so of course Rickford and Rickford had to address the (uninformed) idea that Black English is just “English without rules.” It’s not and it never was.

You don’t get to claim that some specific group(s) of people don’t have any rules to the way they speak. Because if you claim that, it will say more about your judgment of those people than it will about your assessment of their language. (Well, it will also say that you’re not very good at making assessments about language.)

Every language variety follows systematic rules. Every single one. Not some. Not most. All of them. They may not follow the same rules as each other, but they follow rules nonetheless.

#Themself all the way

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Oxford Dictionaries has a great blog post called “Is ‘themself’ a real word?” After showing that themself is indeed a really real word, they note that it’s still not quite acceptable in Standard English. I really wish it was though. It’s so perfect. Check out the post to see more!

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/01/15/themself/

#TeamThemself

Grammarly also sucks at subjects

Joe McVeigh1 Comment

Hey, remember when I wrote about the YUNiversity and their crazy ideas on what a subject is? Remember how they said the subject of sentence is ALWAYS a noun? Well, they’re not the only ones in crazy grammar town. Grammarly also likes to play fast and loose with grammatical subjects. Check it:

Grammarly subjects

First off, not every sentence needs a subject. Most do, but not all. For example, imperative sentences do not have subjects because the subject is often implied:

Just do it.

Don’t worry, be happy.

Get to the choppaaaaaaaa!

What’s a little crazy is that Grammarly uses an imperative sentence as an example to show that nouns can act as objects. Do they think that Give is the subject of their example sentence? (Narrator’s voice: It’s not. The sentence doesn’t have a subject.)

Grammarly imperative object

Second, like I said in the YUNiversity post, the subject of a sentence in English is not always a noun. It often is, but not always. The following can act as the subject in English:

Dummy it – It’s hot.

Unstressed/existential there – There’s plenty of time.

Prepositional phrase – Up in the front will suit me fine.

Adverb phrase – Gently does it.

Adjective phrase – The comic told some funny jokes.

All types of clauses – That he failed his driving test surprised everybody.; What Grammarly wrote online shocked me.

And more!

The rest of the info on the Grammarly blog post is pretty good, so that’s nice. I don’t know if Grammarly is copying stuff off of YUNiversity or if it’s the other way around. But somebody is cheating off somebody.

Call them what they want

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

There was an op-ed by Abigail Shrier in the Wall Street Journal (it’s paywalled, but no need to click, I’ve copied the relevant bits below) on August 29, 2018. It’s about what a terrible thing it is to make public employees use the preferred pronouns of the public individuals that they are serving. Basically, it’s about how people should be able to call others “he” or “she” even if the person that they are talking to prefers a different pronoun, such as “they”.

I only want to point out two problems with this person’s argument. First, the writer says:

Typically, in America, when groups disagree, we leave them to employ the vocabularies that reflect their values. My “affirmative action” is your “racial preferences.” One person’s “fetus” is another’s “baby boy.” This is as it should be; an entire worldview is packed into the word “fetus.” Another is contained in the reference to one person as “them” or “they.” For those with a religious conviction that sex is both biological and binary, God’s purposeful creation, denial of this involves sacrilege no less than bowing to idols in the town square. When the state compels such denial among religious people, it clobbers the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, lending government power to a contemporary variant on forced conversion.

But that’s not how it works. If you work for the government and you want to use slurs to refer to people, too bad. You can’t do that. I’m sure Richard Spencer (the head racist du jour) or David Duke (your parents’ racist du jour) would argue that it is part of their “worldview” to call black and brown and gay people all the horrible things that they call them. But fuck that nonsense. We don’t let them use the words that they want. We shun them for it. And if they work for the government, we penalize them for it (yeah, I know, things are pretty bad right now, but if you’re arguing that the racists currently in the US government should be allowed to keep on being racist, then you’re wrong).

Second, the writer backs up a linguistic argument* by referencing Locke. Philip Locke, you ask? The linguist who wrote University Grammar: A University Course? Haha. No. John Locke, the [checks notes] philosopher from the [checks notes again] 17th century. I wonder if anything has changed in linguistics since then. Guess not!

Here’s what it boils down to: you don’t get to call anyone anything you want without any repercussions. Sorry! (not sorry) Can’t bring yourself to use a person’s preferred pronoun because of your bigoted worldview? Change your worldview. Or just call them by their name FFS. This isn’t that difficult and you don’t need to write an op-ed about it, Abigail.

Ok, one final point. The writer says:

In most contexts, I would have no problem addressing others in any manner they chose.

That sounds an awful lot like “I’m not a racist, but…”

 

*Sure, the argument is about culture and worldviews and society – but wrapped up in all of that is language. And the article is specifically about words.

A great linguistics show on NPR’s Code Switch

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Earlier this year, I wrote about an episode of NPR’s Code Switch and I was highly critical. The problems with that show weren’t the fault of the hosts, but rather a theater professor who was out of his league talking about American accents (much like I would be out of my league talking about theater in a radio interview). But Code Switch is back with another episode on linguistics and… Wow, is it good! I mean really, really good. They talked to linguists and language scholars about the origin of Broadcaster English and how there is no single variety of Standard American English. They also got into the stigmatization of accents in society and the media and what that means for people (with the help of Prof. Okim Kang, who has been studying this topic).

And like a good news article, they put a human perspective on it by talking to someone who has been dealing with the problems that come from the insistence that newscasters speak Standard American English.

I’m not going to spoil any more of it for you. I recommend that you go listen to this episode yourself. You can find the transcript or download the episode here. Listen online  here.

And if that’s not enough for you, then you’re in luck. These are some big topics in linguistics. There’s much more out there for you to learn about them.

A tired English “rule”

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Here’s a good example of why we split infinitives in English:

You may have heard that it’s bad grammar to split an infinitive. This is a made up rule that was taken directly from Latin. Thankfully, it seems to have been buried for good as people are starting to realize it’s a ridiculous rule. The infinitive is already split in English – there’s always a space between to and the verb. And you can see here that following the rule would produce some really weird sentences:

I wonder what it feels like to be not tired.

I wonder what it feels like not to be tired.

Both of those sound unnatural and unindiomatic.

Who cares about Latin plurals?

Joe McVeigh3 Comments

Apparently a lot of people do. You know this. You’ve probably heard something along the lines of what is said in the following tweet:

Mike Pope had a nice response:

But this got me thinking: It’s a bit of slippery slope to say that we have to follow the pluralization rules for Latin with (some) Latin words. Why stop with Latin? English has taken words from other languages as well. And why stop at pluralization? Latin has endings for when a word was used as a subject or object (if my rudimentary Latin is correct). So why not bring those along too? I wrote a joking response to point this out:

As fate would have it, James Harbeck published an article on this very topic on the very same day that these tweets appeared. And Mike Pope published a similar blog post a while ago. I’m not going to restate what they say – you should go read their posts. Instead, I’d like to second what Dr Sarah Shulist responded with and add to it:

The reason that we are told to follow the Latin’s pluralization methods for words from Latin is because Latin has long been held in high prestige by educators and others who wield power in society and language learning. That’s it. If Finnish was held in as high regard as Latin, then we would have people saying it’s incorrect to use saunas because the plural form in Finnish is saunat. But Finnish is not held in the same regard as Latin. Same goes for almost every other language.

But when you think about it, requiring people to use Latin plurals is actually pretty… lazy. We’re talking about noun morphology and in English there are really only a few things we can do to words that are nouns. I know I’m oversimplifying things here, but stay with me. We can:

  • make nouns plural (hero >> heroes)
  • add a genitive marker (hero >> hero’s)
  • add prefixes and suffixes (superhero, heroism, etc.)

Is anyone arguing for applying the Latin genitive to words from Latin? Of course not. Because the prescription that you must use Latin plurals with words from Latin isn’t about grammar at all. It’s about language policing and linguistic discrimination. It’s about putting other people down for following English grammar instead of Latin grammar WHEN THEY’RE SPEAKING ENGLISH. And like most forms of discrimination, it’s lazy thinking. It is only one aspect of noun morphology applied to only some words from pretty much only one language.

To be clear: I’m not saying that it’s discriminatory to use a word from another language and not follow the morphology of that language. It’s kind of the opposite of that. To say that people must follow the pluralization morphology of Latin when they use a word from Latin is classist. When people are speaking English, there is nothing wrong with them using plain old English morphology to pluralize nouns. And, yes, that holds for words from Latin too. It’s possible that people don’t realize that they’re practicing linguistic discrimination when they play the pedant card with words from Latin, but that’s not an excuse. Maybe next time point out that the hill they are dying on isn’t so much a mighty mountain as it is a puny pismire hill.

Anyway, by far the most pragmatic reply was from Marie Georghiou:

Marie wins.

Go listen to Fiat Lex

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

If Lingthusiasm and The Vocal Fries have you yearning for more linguistics, never fear! There’s a new language podcast on the map. It’s called Fiat Lex and it is (quote) “A podcast about dictionaries by people who write dictionaries. Yes, really.” The hosts are Kory Stamper and Steve Kleinedler, two lexicographers of high renown! They’re up to four episodes now and they are all great. Go check them out!

https://fiatlex.podbean.com/